Category Archives: Cataloging

Lori Birrell and Marcy Strong from the University of Rochester, River Campus Libraries have published an article in Archival Practice that details a collaborative effort between catalogers, reference subject specialists and special collections librarians to process manuscript collections.

The Hipstas (High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship) Project from the University of Texas Austin in collaboration with the Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign uses an algorithm to visualize and classify sound.

This tool was originally used to identify bird calls, and is now being used to analyze archival sound recordings and make them more usable. Check out The Chronicle of Higher Education article for more information.

The study also found that “[a]lmost two-thirds (65 percent) of libraries anticipate flat or decreased operating budgets in FY2012.” In this environment, collaboration among libraries and other organizations can be a strategy to address our changing needs. Collaboration allows libraries to achieve more by sharing staff resources and sharing the burdens of cataloging projects and new initiatives.

There are additional benefits to collaboration. Libraries with small staffs can learn from each other and achieve more by combining resources. Such efforts bring more ideas to the table, enhance creativity, and increase librarians’ ability to solve problems.”

With relatively new staff in all the Troy University campus libraries technical services departments, it was critical to collaborate on policies and procedures for consistency. Developing an online manual housed on a wiki that could be used and contributed to by staff on all three campuses was essential to this goal. Multi-campus meetings and online discussions are additional methods we use to promote collaboration. This article will include a literature review of collaboration and wikis along with methods the Troy University Libraries Technical Services departments are using to establish communication across the campuses.

Catalogers at The Ohio State University (OSU) Libraries, Columbus Metropolitan Library (CML), and Cleveland Public Library (CPL) are collaborating through the Ohio Name Authority Cooperative (NACO) funnel to create personal name authority records that directly benefit library patrons. Although OSU provides training and review, all three libraries receive value from the collaboration. There have been obstacles, however, such as cataloging training and workflow differences between public and academic libraries. This article will discuss the challenges and benefits of this inter-library cataloger collaboration from the point of view of all three libraries, plans for the future, and best practices for other libraries that are interested in public/academic library collaborations of this kind.

A new blog on cooperative cataloging is calling for professional metadata creators to participate. “The site has two primary purposes: 1) to offer a serious alternative to RDA and 2) to offer a place for sharing bibliographic concepts within the general metadata community.” The call for participation offers a forum for provocative information exchanges as illustrated by the following quote: “Many of our patrons have discovered they prefer to use non-library tools to find, access, and use information in ways that could not have been imagined only 15 years ago. It seems natural to ask: What can be the role of library catalogs, and even of librarians themselves, in a future that is so difficult to predict and that threatens to leave them behind?”

The site was launched by James Weinheimer, Director of Library and Information Services at the American University of Rome